Australian Adventures: Classes, Catering, 5Ks and Field Trips

I am three weeks into classes now, so I am starting to settle into a routine here at my new home away from home. I am enjoying my classes so far. Marine Ecology and Environmental Assessment is probably my favorite; it is all about designing good sampling experiments and how to analyze your results using statistics. Biodiversity of Tropical Australia has been a review of things I know already but hopefully we should be getting into more specifics soon. My Australian cinema class is interesting - we watch a different movie every week and break into small groups to discuss them. So far we have watched "Bitter Springs," "Sunday Too Far Away", and "My Brilliant Career." Applied Soil Science is interesting as well (to me, although my friends love to make fun of me for liking soil) and we have a lot of opportunities to get out in the field during practicals.

Last weekend was super busy and worth mentioning. On Friday I started my part time job - as an on-call waitstaff for a catering company. It is the perfect job because it is not regular hours, I can refuse shifts, and it pays really well. Friday I worked a birthday party and Saturday I worked a wedding. I basically do anything that is needed - I was a busgirl, prep cook, dishwasher, runner... It was a little hectic on Saturday with tons of different people yelling at me to do conflicting jobs, but hopefully I will get better at it. I was supposed to work this weekend as well but they ended up not needing me.

Saturday morning I was woken up by the RA's in my hall running down the hall, banging on people's doors, playing music through the loudspeaker at 6:30AM. They wanted us all to wake up and run a campus-wide 5k to earn points for Fischer Shield, the sports competition between dorms. Everyone who finished the "Cross Country" would win 1 point for their building, with the top twenty boys and girls winning more. So I got up and ran it! It was actually kind of fun.

After the race, I had a field trip for my Marine Ecology class. We went to Rowes Bay on the coast of Townsville, a rocky intertidal zone. At low tide, it looks like this:

There were 8 areas mapped out on the coast: 4 in a place that experiences a lot of tramping by humans and 4 in an area that until recently has been closed off to the public since it was a military base. Within each four, there were two regions of shore, east and west, and within each region there were two sites, high tide and low tide. Our job was to go around with 1x1m squares, randomly assign location within the site to place the square ("quadrat") and pick out the snails (Nerita) living in it. We then measured each snail, recorded the data, and replaced them. The objective was to determine the influence of trampling on snail size/ abundance. Nerita look like this:

Sunday we went back to Rowes Bay with my Biodiversity class, where we wandered around the rocks and looked for different animals, noting how they changed as we got closer to the sea. We saw TONS of different species.

Me with a huge sea cucumber